Paul Tseng () was a Taiwanese-born American-Canadian applied

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

and a professor at the Department of Mathematics at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

, in

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is the List of municipalities in Washington, most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington (state), Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the List of Unit ...

. Tseng was recognized by his peers to be one of the leading optimization researchers of his generation. On August 13, 2009, Paul Tseng went missing while kayaking in the

Jinsha River The Jinsha River (, Classical Tibetan, Tibetan: Dri Chu, འབྲི་ཆུ, ) or Lu river, is the Chinese name for the upper stretches of the Yangtze River. It flows through the provinces of the PRC, provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yu ...

in the

Yunnan Yunnan; is an inland Provinces of China, province in Southwestern China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 47.2 million (as of 2020). The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders the Chinese provinces ...

province of

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

and is presumed dead.

Biography

Tseng was born September 21, 1959, in

Hsinchu, Taiwan Hsinchu (, ), officially Hsinchu City, is a city located in northwestern Taiwan. It is the most populous city in Taiwan that is not a special municipality, with estimated 450,655 inhabitants. Hsinchu is a coastal city bordering the Taiwan ...

. In December 1970, Tseng's family moved to

Vancouver, British Columbia Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the cit ...

. Tseng received his B.Sc. from Queen's University in 1981 and his Ph.D. from

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

in 1986. In 1990 Tseng moved to the

's Department of Mathematics. Tseng has conducted research primarily in continuous optimization and secondarily in discrete optimization and distributed computation.

Research

Tseng made many contributions to

mathematical optimization Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criteria, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfiel ...

, publishing many articles and helping to develop quality software that has been widely used. He published over 120 papers in optimization and had close collaborations with several colleagues, including

Dimitri Bertsekas Dimitri Panteli Bertsekas (born 1942, Athens, ) is an applied mathematician, electrical engineer, and computer scientist, a McAfee Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in School of Engineering at the Massa ...

and Zhi-Quan Tom Luo. Tseng's research subjects include: * Efficient algorithms for structured convex programs and network flow problems, *

Complexity Complexity characterizes the behavior of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, leading to non-linearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence. The term is generally used to c ...

analysis of

interior point method Interior-point methods (also referred to as barrier methods or IPMs) are algorithms for solving Linear programming, linear and nonlinear programming, non-linear convex optimization problems. IPMs combine two advantages of previously-known algorit ...

s for

linear programming Linear programming (LP), also called linear optimization, is a method to achieve the best outcome (such as maximum profit or lowest cost) in a mathematical model whose requirements and objective are represented by linear function#As a polynomia ...

, *

Parallel Parallel may refer to: Mathematics * Parallel (geometry), two lines in the Euclidean plane which never intersect * Parallel (operator), mathematical operation named after the composition of electrical resistance in parallel circuits Science a ...

and

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

, * Error bounds and convergence analysis of iterative algorithms for optimization problems and

variational inequalities In mathematics, a variational inequality is an inequality (mathematics), inequality involving a Functional (mathematics), functional, which has to be Inequality (mathematics)#Solving Inequalities, solved for all possible values of a given Variable ( ...

, * Interior point methods and semidefinite relaxations for hard quadratic and matrix optimization problems, and * Applications of large scale optimization techniques in

signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing ''signals'', such as audio signal processing, sound, image processing, images, Scalar potential, potential fields, Seismic tomograph ...

and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

. In his research, Tseng gave a new proof for the sharpest complexity result for path-following interior-point methods for linear programming. Furthermore, together with Tom Luo, he resolved a long-standing open question on the convergence of

matrix splitting In the mathematical discipline of numerical linear algebra, a matrix splitting is an expression which represents a given matrix as a sum or difference of matrices. Many iterative methods (for example, for systems of differential equations) depe ...

algorithms for linear complementarity problems and affine variational inequalities. Tseng was the first to establish the convergence of the affine scaling algorithm for linear programming in the presence of degeneracy. Tseng has coauthored (with his Ph.D. advisor,

) a publicly available network optimization program, called RELAX, which has been widely used in industry and academia for research purposes. This software has been used by statisticians like Paul R. Rosenbaum and

Donald Rubin Donald Bruce Rubin (born December 22, 1943) is an Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Harvard University, where he chaired the department of Statistics for 13 years. He also works at Tsinghua University in China and at Temple University in Philad ...

in their work on

propensity score matching In the statistical analysis of observational data, propensity score matching (PSM) is a statistical matching technique that attempts to estimate the effect of a treatment, policy, or other intervention by accounting for the covariates that pred ...

. Tseng's software for matching has similarly been used in

nonparametric statistics Nonparametric statistics is a type of statistical analysis that makes minimal assumptions about the underlying distribution of the data being studied. Often these models are infinite-dimensional, rather than finite dimensional, as in parametric s ...

to implement

exact test An exact (significance) test is a statistical test such that if the null hypothesis is true, then all assumptions made during the derivation of the distribution of the test statistic are met. Using an exact test provides a significance test that ...

s. Tseng has also developed a program called ERELAXG, for network optimization problems with gains. In 2010 conferences in his honor were held at the University of Washington and at

Fudan University Fudan University (FDU) is a public university, national public university in Yangpu, Shanghai, Yangpu, Shanghai, China. It is affiliated with the Ministry of Education (China), Ministry of Education and is co-funded with the Shanghai Municipal ...

in Shanghai. Tseng's personal web page can be accessed in the exact state it was at the time of his disappearance, and contains many of his writings.

Travels and disappearance

Paul Tseng was an ardent bicyclist, kayaker and backpacker. He took many adventurous trips, including kayak tours along the Mekong, the Danube, the Nile and the Amazon. On August 13, 2009, Paul Tseng went missing while kayaking in the Yantze river near Lijiang, in Yunnan province of China and is now presumed dead.

Notes

External links

Math Programming Society
from

DBLP DBLP is a computer science bibliography website. Starting in 1993 at Universität Trier in Germany, it grew from a small collection of HTML files and became an organization hosting a database and logic programming bibliography site. Since Novem ...

.
Publications
from

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...

. {{DEFAULTSORT:Tseng, Paul 1959 births 2000s missing person cases 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American computer scientists American electrical engineers American people of Chinese descent American people of Taiwanese descent Canadian computer scientists Canadian electrical engineers Canadian emigrants to the United States Canadian mathematicians Canadian people of Chinese descent Control theorists Hakka scientists Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Missing person cases in China Missing American people Naturalized citizens of Canada People from Hsinchu Queen's University at Kingston alumni Scientists from Vancouver Canadian systems scientists Taiwanese emigrants to Canada Academic staff of the University of British Columbia University of Washington faculty American systems scientists Missing Canadian people

Biography

Research

Travels and disappearance

See also

Notes

External links